Eighteenth-century Aesthetics Revive a Coastal Residence North of Beirut

Jubayl, the small seaside city twenty-five miles north of Beirut, is one of those Mediterranean sites so attractive to settlement that culture supersedes culture until the archaeological strata resemble a mille-feuille. At the bottom are Neolithic fishermen, whose one-room huts are survived by their lime-washed floors. Later, about the third millennium b.c., the town flourished as a trading port, supplying Egyptian pharaohs with cedarwood and receiving papyrus scrolls and alabaster artifacts in return. For centuries it was the center of Phoenician culture. Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians conquered the city at various times, but in 333 b.c. the citizens wisely surrendered to Alexander the Great. Then came Rome, Byzantium, sundry Crusades, the Ottoman Empire and the colonial French, each adding new stones to the pile. Archaeologists believe that the city of Jubayl, known historically as Byblos, has been continuously inhabited for seven thousand years.

In all of that time, though, few residents likely enjoyed the understated luxury found in the home of Michel Charriere and Joseph Achkar, designers and antiques collectors who, six years ago, turned their attention to reviving an abandoned house that was a governor’s seat during the Ottoman Empire.

“We didn’t renovate it,” Achkar says while enjoying the late afternoon on a terrace overlooking the town and sea. “We just restored it to keep the poetry and to give the impression that it had been closed since the 1700s.”

That job was made easier by the house’s peculiar recent history. When the two men discovered it, the forbidding three-story limestone block was almost a ruin, luxuriating grandly in its groves of eucalyptus and olives, jasmine and oranges, but slowly fading to gray inside. It had not been renovated since the end of the nineteenth century, and for decades its only resident had been a recluse. “A hermit lived here, and no one else had seen the interior for forty or fifty years,” Achkar explains. “This was a miracle for us. You know how when some people restore an old house they make a completely modern one? We didn’t want that.”

This Ottoman-era time capsule became the starting point for Charriere and Achkar’s respectful, low-impact reinhabitation. There would be no gut-ting, no stainless-steel conveniences, no overly slick revival—but also no shortage of gracious Near Eastern comforts.

The heart of the symmetrically planned house is a cruciform central hall on the raised main level. Its crossing point is dominated by a low marble basin, one of several original to the house. Nineteenth-century Egyptian side chairs flank the door to a balconied gallery. In summer the filigreed panes can be removed from the ogive windows, which allows cool air to circulate between the marble floors and the painted ceilings.

Throughout the house, inlaid occasional tables and settees, pastel walls and traceried windows are a foil to a more martial atmosphere. In the audience chamber, off the central hall, supplicants would hang their cloaks and weapons on pegs between the windows before speaking with the governor. In a sitting room with six windows and horizon views, in the southwest corner of the house, trompe l’oeil frescoes record scenes of Ottoman military triumphs, from Egypt to the Dardanelles.

Despite their Christianity, the local Ottoman governors followed the customs of their Muslim princes, and the house was built accordingly. A corbeled moucharaby, one of the few that remain in the region, opens from the audience chamber. The segregated bedrooms for women can still be found on the as-yet-unrenovated attic level. (A maze of secret stairways allowed discreet commerce between floors.)

Charriere and Achkar have fitted the governor’s chamber, on the main level, with an elaborate canopy bed that was made in 1830 for the wedding of a Javanese prince. The bed, which was designed for entertaining as much as for sleeping, is intricately carved with fruit and fish and at least one serpentine dragon. Why introduce this lone piece from afar into a program that hews so closely to more local sources? “Java is an Islamic island,” Achkar says. “And we thought it was beautiful.”

Downstairs, in the rough arches of the foundation, one finds the flagstone-paved kitchen and the long vault of the former stables. Both are used for dining, as the season dictates. In keeping with the traditions that prevailed at the time the house was built, meals take place wherever whim and weather converge: in the kitchen on a wet winter night, in the cool, marble-floored central hall on hot summer days, on a lower-level patio in spring. That patio, home to a Roman-era fountain and ancient olive trees, trails off behind a wall that hints at other, older ruins on the property, overhung by jacaranda and palms. In the garden, standing on the palimpsest of Jubayl history, on the layers of undiscovered finds that may yet be the treasures of some future dig, it appears that the Ottoman governor—or at least the providential hermit—might still be in residence. Which is exactly the effect that Michel Charriere and Joseph Achkar were after. “People come to the house,” Achkar says, laughing, “and they ask when we’re going to start working on it.”